Flanders

by Anthony, Patricia

  Riddell cried some more, then wiped his eyes. He talked about Scotch broom and dandelion, about colt’s foot and feverfew. I lay down on shaded grass that still smelled warm from the sun and watched white butterflies flirt with a hedgerow while Sergeant Riddell wove a quiet funeral wreath for his mother.

  When Riddell was finished, O’Shaughnessy said, “I remember when me own mother passed on. It was hard, and me being a priest. I know that you’re not of the Faith, Sergeant, but all the same, I’ll pray for her when I say the Mass.”

  I rolled over on my back. One lone butterfly floated upward, teased through the tree branches, free and on its way.

  “ ’Tis important to remember her, I think. To say a few words. For knowing she’s in a better place doesn’t help with the hurting. There. There now. I know. It’s all right. I know.” The ugly sounds of a man’s weeping, and over that O’Shaughnessy’s simple and eloquent comfort. Finally, “Would you be wanting to pray with me now, lad?”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  High up, where the butterfly drifted, a commotion of branches and birds singing loud. I thought about Ma, and what sort of wreath I’d weave her. Stern heart-ribbons, I guess, plain and strong. Nothing fancy.

  I dozed off during the whispered prayer. O’Shaughnessy woke me and helped me to my feet. I woke dazed and bleary-eyed, confused to find myself in a meadow.

  “Will you be coming with us?” O’Shaughnessy asked Riddell.

  I saw Riddell’s tear-swollen face and remembered.

  “In a bit. I’ll splash me face first. Get presentable. You go on, then.” He stuck his hand out at me. “Thank you for coming by, Stanhope,” he said, like we were standing around in his parlor.

  I shook his hand, told him again how sorry I was, and got polite murmurs in answer.

  Back on the road, O’Shaughnessy said, “I saw me mum after, you know. Me da, too. Wouldn’t doubt that Sergeant will see his. Mothers come back to check, to tuck you in of a night, and see that you’re eating well. Is yours alive?”

  “Alive and kicking and ornery as ever.”

  “And your da?”

  “He’s a son of a bitch.”

  The breeze brought with it a faint reminder of the sea. I was hungry all of a sudden. Restless and ready for a drink.

  “Would you be wanting to talk about him, lad?”

  I told him, “Not ever.”

  When I got back to the rest area, I left O’Shaughnessy and found the rest of the platoon. Pickering said he wanted to visit the town whores, so we went to the blue-light tent and then we walked to town together. There were four whores in the whorehouse, all of them ugly; but I fucked the tar out of one all the same, hammered her so hard that she got to complaining. I threw an extra five shillings in the cardboard box and left. Pickering and me picked up Foy, and the three of us went out drinking together. In the bar, a Belgian soldier shoved me and I coldcocked him. Foy, who’s a corporal now, had the balls to give me a dressing-down, and him every bit as drunk as I was. Pickering made us leave before the Belgian came back with his friends.

  As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was asleep. Wildflowers were blooming among the marble angels now: yellow flowers in little bouquets and lilac ones with long lacy stems. All around the graveyard the trees—dark and secret with leaves—had fruited. Everywhere you looked there was life, Bobby. It hung heavy and pregnant from the branches. In the sunny spaces, it sprouted high and wild. Life, God, plentiful as the seeds in a woman. And through that fertile graveyard bees circled, their legs thick with golden creation.

  As I stood there, I noticed Dunleavy standing beside me, looking out, too, on all that life. Funny. In the dream I didn’t remember that he was dead particularly, but I remembered real clear the angry way we had left each other. It seemed he had forgotten, though, for he was grinning ear to ear.

  He shook my hand and said in a loud, boisterous voice, “I’m much better now, thanks. Much, much better.”

  There was pink in his cheeks. His grip was strong.

  “Much better,” he said. “I’ll be going now.” And then he walked away. You know what, Bobby? I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.

  Love,

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  JULY 17, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  I want you to tell Ma something for me, Bobby. Find you a time when the house is quiet and supper’s not waiting and tell her that Travis Lee forgives her. I know she’s been waiting for that a long time.

  See, when Pa was home, it was him who took up all her space. He was so big and she used herself up just surviving, so there wasn’t nothing of her left for me. Then came the fancy goats and scrabbling for the next meal. It was a hard time, and she was too busy for mothering. I want her to know I understand that.

  Also, tell her I understand why she went to spoiling you. Hell, by the time Ma had a minute to herself, I was already too growed up to be loving on. You were perfect: six years old and a cherub-faced hellion.

  I never begrudged you anything; never faulted Ma for not standing between me and the belt. Seemed like growing up, Ma and me were kept as prisoners in the dark. But still, we were together.

  Reason I’m thinking on her is that Riddell is still mourning his mum. You can see it in his face, in the way he walks. He doesn’t talk much lately, doesn’t laugh. Some ways, I don’t think he’ll ever get over losing her.

  You couldn’t ever call Ma gentle or sweet. She wasn’t made as delicate as a wild marjoram flower; but she raised herself a pair of strong boys. Neither one of us will be giving up on life after she’s gone. I want you to promise me something, Bobby. Before this week is out, you tell her thank you for me.

  Travis Lee

  JULY 22, THE FORWARD TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  Yesterday I’d gone to Support to visit the medic. A headache was all it was, remedied easy by an aspirin powder. On the way back I was alone, threading my way up the communications trench, when I turned a corner and came upon a Boche. It took a heartbeat for me to believe what I was seeing. You understand, Bobby? There was a Boche in the trench. A Boche, just standing there.

  He was so young and he looked so lost that I never even shouldered my rifle. He was wounded. There were great blossoms of blood all across his belly, and his helmet was off. I wondered how he had got misplaced so bad, and if he wasn’t scared to death. Then he raised his head and looked right at me. He had guileless brown eyes and a baby face and pudgy hands, so new to the front that he hadn’t had time to get worn thin and hard. Lord God, he was a pitiful sight. Young and sorely wounded. His right hand was missing.

  I took a step forward and he started fading. When he went, he went misty-like. I could see the dirt wall of the trench through him. I called out for him to stop, but I wasn’t quick enough. He was gone.

  I went back to my station at the fire bay. I set up my ammunition and rifle and started looking for targets. I missed two easy shots. That’s when I asked the new lieutenant, Blackhall, to send for O’Shaughnessy.

  “Want to pray over your aim, eh, Stanhope?” He laughed.

  “Please get him, sir. And permission to take a short rest period.”

  Blackhall’s a small man with a face like a suspicious monkey. “You’re shaking. That won’t do for a sharpshooter. ‘As you been drinking? For I ‘ear rumors.”

  “Sir.” And I was near tears when I said it. My voice was unsteady. “Sir,” I whispered, “please call him.”

  Blackhall started barking orders. I sat down on the firestep.

  I could see Marrs out of the corner of my eye. “You sick?” he asked.

  If I’d tried to answer, I’d have started boo-hooing.

  “Stanhope?” Poor solicitous Marrs. “You all right, then?”

  Pickering’s jovial “It’s that bloody dysentery. Don’t shit here, Stanhope. We’ll make you clean the firestep.”

  Gatlin, one of the new boys, saying, “What’s the matter with ’im?”<
br />
  “Dysentery. You want to carry him, Gatlin? I’ll take his top half, you have his bottom.”

  Footsteps boomed along the duckboards and everyone got real quiet. A hand clasped my knee. O’Shaughnessy said, “Travis.” He bent down to look into my face. “Will you be needing me?”

  When I nodded, he took my arm and helped me up. He asked Marrs to take my rifle, for I couldn’t hold onto it no more.

  “Crikey!” Marrs cried out. “What’d the medic say, Stanhope? What’d ’e tell you?”

  Pickering asked in a voice stripped of humor. “You really sick? Anything we can do, Father?”

  O’Shaughnessy waved their questions away.

  We walked, Bobby—walked along the front line and down the trench past where the Boche boy had been. We ended up in Miller’s dugout. It was empty but for the batman. O’Shaughnessy asked him to leave.

  I sat down on the ground and bawled—not caring who might be listening. I cried because I knew it had to be ghosts I was seeing. I cried because I was scared of dying, because I felt so damned sorry for that Boche. I cried for everything, I guess.

  O’Shaughnessy sat down next to me and slipped his arm around my shoulders. The holding wasn’t as good as Ma’s or as the calico girl’s, but it was holding all the same.

  “I hear you can forgive things.”

  “Tell me, lad,” he said.

  “I hurt a woman.” I don’t know why I told him that part, it was a small thing, really. “She didn’t have nothing to do with why I was mad, and loving someone, even a whore, ought to be a happy thing. But I fucked her so hard, sir. It was fury I seeded her with. I squeezed her arms and titties till I bruised her black and blue and she was begging me to stop. When I didn’t, she started crying. I really hurt her. I don’t know why I did it, sir. I been asking myself that.”

  Miller’s dugout smelled strangely empty, no life nor death to it.

  I wiped my eyes. “You going to forgive me, or what?”

  “Are you contrite, then? For both your sins? For ’twas not only the beating, my son, but fornication, too.”

  My shoulders slumped. I was nearly too exhausted to move my mouth. Twenty-three years old and so goddamned tired. “Sorry for hurting her. Yeah.”

  “So there is that much heavenly rejoicing, at any rate. And do you sincerely promise not to do it again?”

  I nodded. My back ached. My arms felt too weak to lift.

  “Well, then! If you were of the Faith, we should have a proper penance.”

  There was a map on Miller’s wall with lines of red pins and lines of blue. Red to the west. So it was us who were bleeding.

  “At least beg for forgiveness, Travis. Can you do that? Apologize to God.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was cool and damp in that dugout. I remembered when Ma would take you and me down to the root cellar when there was a cyclone brewing. There were spiders lurking around the jars of canned corn and black-eyed peas. When Ma’d light the lamp, you’d go to screaming. I thought how nice that was, screaming over spiders, and never having to scream over Pa.

  “He hurt my ma, sir.”

  “Who was that, Travis?”

  “My pa hurt my ma, sir. After I hurt that whore, I went out and started a bar fight. Pa was fond of bar fights, too. I had an uncle always said women turn into their mothers and men turn into their daddies. Do we have to, sir?”

  “I think you needn’t, if you have a mind not to.”

  “I took a thirty ought-six to him.”

  O’Shaughnessy gave a long sigh. “And did you kill him?”

  “No. But I tried like hell.”

  “Ask God to forgive your anger.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was safe there in Miller’s dugout, the cyclone brewing.

  “Lad? Failing was not a sin.”

  It’s good to know that, I guess. Miller walked in on us about then. When he caught sight of what was going on, he started to leave. I got up, dusted my pants, and told him O’Shaughnessy and me were finished. I thanked him for the use of his dugout and asked if I could have the time until dinner off. What I didn’t tell him was that I couldn’t shoot nobody, Bobby. Not that day.

  Miller was real nice about it. He asked if I was well, and I told him I was. He asked after you and Ma—he’d heard about Riddell, I guess—and I told him y’all were just fine. He insisted that I take me some cookies. Three big hazelnut cookies. They were so good that I finished them before I ever got back to the forward trench and told Blackhall about the orders. Then I went in and lay down in my cubbyhole.

  We sleep like mud dauber wasps in the dugouts here, Bobby: honeycomb holes in the walls, sandbags all around, a plank over me that my nose nearly touches. Earth to three sides, snuggled up close.

  Marrs came in and asked it I was all right. I said I was. After a while he left me alone.

  I wasn’t all right. I won’t be for a while. I never told O’Shaughnessy the very thing I needed to: about LeBlanc and the way he killed that Boche. Was it really him I saw in the trench, that sapper? Or was guilt just stirring up my imagination? If I was really seeing a ghostie, it sure beats hell out of how I imagined things work. The world is topsy-turvy right now, Bobby, and that scares the shit out of me. One thing, though: All this time I’d been thinking only about the horror of what LeBlanc had done. It took the Boche to make me feel the pity.

  Travis Lee

  * * *

  JULY 27, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  The last night we were forward I woke up to the noise of explosions. I thought we were being shelled until I remembered that we were on the front line.

  Somewhere down the trench I could hear Blackhall shouting, “Fix bayonets!”

  I ran out of my dugout. A bogeyman stood in the dark gully of the trench. His face was blackened, his uniform sooty. He was aiming a rifle at me. He fired, and in the dim glow from the dugout’s door I saw the pale puff from the barrel, heard the bullet go buzzing past.

  Another shadow figure leaped over the parapet. I took to my heels. See, all that time I was thinking the first Boche was a ghostie, Bobby. When I knew for sure he was real, it was too late to grab my rifle. Behind me I heard Pickering’s dismayed shout, “What bleeding luck!” I heard the pop of rifle fire, the crack of grenades bursting. The air went thick with gunpowder smoke.

  I darted around the corner of a fire bay, ran through a traverse. Ahead, men had come out of the dugouts and were milling, confused.

  I screamed, “Encroachment! Encroachment behind me!”

  Riddell shouted, “Where were the sentries, then?” and, “Get me my Very pistol!”

  “Help Pickering, Sergeant! Please! Pickering’s back there! And oh God, Marrs!”

  Some of the new boys spooked. They started chucking Battye bombs. Sergeant told them to stop, that they might be killing our own. He got them in line and had the front boys fix bayonets. They went charging around the corner and out of sight.

  Boche in our trenches. Our small contained world coming to an end. There was no place to run from the Germans, so I went charging back toward the encroachment. All around me, men were up on the firesteps, shooting wildly into the dark. Sergeant’s Very lights went up. Flares went up next, bursting like pale green meteors. The firing from our side crescendoed; and with it, the fast steady chatter of the machine guns.

  In the next traverse, a Boche was waiting. I didn’t see him until I was on him, and then it was too late. Before he had a chance to fire, I’d run him down.

  We fell, tangled together, struggling. He fought, but I punched him hard, wrested away his gun. Straddling him, I looked down. He was bleeding from the mouth and grunting something in German. It took me a while to realize he was trying to surrender. He was just a goddamned kid, Bobby. Probably not old enough to grow a good beard.

  “You all right, Stanhope?” From the dark of the corner came Riddell’s bland question.

  I got up, holding the Boche rifle. I grabbed
the boy’s hand and pulled him up, too.

  “Good work.”

  We were alone in that traverse, just the three of us: the boy with his hands over his head; me holding the boy’s weapon, Riddell holding his. Above us, the flares and Very lights were burning out.

  “Is it over, Sergeant?”

  Riddell was staring at that boy so strange. “Bit of rum luck, ain’t it,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “Foy’s wounded. Tucker and Redding is dead.”

  It happened so fast I guess I couldn’t have stopped him. Riddell lowered his rifle and stepped forward quick, just the way you do in practice. And as if that boy had no more meaning than a straw dummy, he ran him through.

  The German boy looked surprised. His arms dropped, and he grabbed the bayonet so tight that his hands squirted blood. He didn’t have the strength to pull the blade out; and when Sergeant twisted the rifle the way you’re supposed to, that Boche boy made a sound. I don’t guess it was a word. I’ll never know. He dropped to his knees like he was praying.

  A few of the men caught up with us—like me, too late to do much good. The boy was already curled up, holding his stomach. Blood pumped between his fingers.

  “Lucky I come along when I did,” Riddell said. “Else Stanhope ’ere would ’ave got it.”

  The boy died before the stretcher bearer arrived. Everything was all right. I suppose it was all right. Three of our platoon dead, but it was the sentries and not me who got in trouble. They found our own forward sapper with his throat slashed. I reckon LeBlanc has started his own private dirty war.

  Everything’s settled back down, but I’ll never feel safe sleeping in the trench again. I figure no one will. Still, we sleep, we eat, we shit. We pour over and over our letters from home. Days now, and nobody’s said a word about me running, or the way that Boche boy in the traverse died. I sure didn’t dare speak up, for I looked into Riddell’s face real careful that night, Bobby. Sergeant may not know what’s waiting for him at home, but one of his questions has been answered: I don’t reckon it’s love for his mum nor any Elgar sort of duty, but Riddell’s found himself something to kill for.